If Empathy Were Allowed Free Reign… Stopping Attacks On the Heart of What It Means to be Human

In many K-12 schools throughout the world, empathy has been prominently included in programs meant to help children learn how to be more emotionally literate, more self-aware, relate better with others, and better understand the people, literature, and historical eras they study.

 

So, until recently, I never imagined that empathy itself or teaching about it could be so controversial, but many GOP are doing all they can to change that. Of course, with all the trauma, stress, and illness that has plagued us over the last three to seven years, doctors, nurses, teachers, first responders, and others have been reporting increasing burn out from all the pain and suffering they’ve witnessed. But that’s different from banning it.

 

If empathy is a human ability to “walk in someone else’s shoes,” and experience the world as we think someone else is experiencing it, then it can definitely help us in our studies, and it can help create a more supportive culture. It can involve “feeling with another,” as the roots of the word are en meaning near, at, within and pathos meaning passion, feeling, suffering. Or sometimes it’s just an ability to read other people.

 

In contrast with empathy, compassion is not just a feeling but more a readiness to act to improve other’s well-being. Sometimes, it builds on empathy; sometimes, it develops from a sense of what’s right to do, or from kindness. In his book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, psychology professor Paul Bloom describes empathy as like a spotlight, narrowing our attention to one place or person; but we can get caught there. Compassion is broader in outlook, with less of a chance of distress. But both are crucially important in our lives.

 

What we’re seeing now by many GOP is a fear of empathy itself and an attempt to outlaw teaching how to strengthen empathy in ourselves and others⎼ how it can help stabilize relationships and communities. Their fear and threats are walling them away from anyone with different views. Who could’ve imagined a major political party would be opposed to strengthening human relationships? If they are so threatened by empathy, compassion must be terrifying.

 

Two right-wing parents in Pennsylvania are suing a school district for teaching empathy and kindness through a program called “Character Strong.” They argue the program violates their Christian beliefs, although they refuse to state which lessons violate their religion. The suit is supported by groups who aim to stop any teaching of social-emotional learning, the history of US racism, and the implementation of restorative justice policies. Maybe for them Christ’s teaching to “love thy neighbor” is also a violation of Christian beliefs. Is empathy now a sin for such Christians?

 

Arkansas GOP Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law this year allowing children under 16 to be hired more easily and without first obtaining a work permit, which means they can work without parent permission and other protections. This followed the actions of the US Labor Department to fine and stop an Arkansas company from using children, as young as 13, to clean “razor sharp claws” in a meat-packing plant and to work with caustic chemicals. Sanders shamelessly defended the freedom of corporations to make a profit over the protection of children.

 

The New York Times reported that migrant children, who were separated from their parents and driven by economic desperation, were being forced into brutal jobs across the US. The jobs involve work that grinds them into exhaustion until they fear they’re trapped for life in awful conditions they can’t escape. The DJT administration turned a blind eye to this, and only in the last two years has the federal government taken action to stop it.

 

If empathy were allowed free rein, such efforts to exploit children and repeal laws that have been in place in the U. S. to protect them for over a hundred years would never be considered or permitted….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

We Need More Creative Drama in Our Lives: Arts Education Might Not Cure Society, but It Can Help Heal Students

Even before the COVID pandemic, arts education was being cut in school districts throughout the country. This was extremely shortsighted then, even worse now.

 

Our children are suffering. According to a report by the American Psychological Association, 71% of parents said the pandemic has taken a toll on their children. Nearly half of LGBTQ+ teens and over 25% of girls have recently contemplated suicide. Many feel hopeless. Anxiety levels are skyrocketing.

 

According to MedicalNewsToday, 75% of youth feel the future is frightening. Although the American Rescue Plan passed by the Biden Administration was a great first step, providing $170 Billion for mental health services for school children, more is needed.

 

And it’s not just the pandemic, not just children missing in-person instruction. It’s our response to the pandemic in the past and the lack of a coherent cultural response now to the environmental emergency, to mass shootings, to injustice and the threat of hate, autocracy and what DJT represents. It’s the GOP attacks on education itself.

 

For many children, the arts could provide motivation to get to school and a doorway into learning itself. It can make school something more than mere work, but a place where they can come alive and see their concerns reflected in the curriculum. They can feel a sense of meaning when so much of the reality around them seems hopeless.

 

According to a study called Champions of Change, arts education can level the playing field, and improve student performance in all areas of learning. This was particularly true with students from low-income backgrounds.

 

The arts provide a more direct entrance into understanding and caring about the experience of others than any other discipline. As such, they provide one of the best ways to embed compassion into the curriculum and to empower young people to take action in all areas of life. This won’t cure society but might heal a student.

 

In 1969, I was in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, and got a chance to witness a ceremony of spirit beings emerging from the jungle to dance a story about the responsibilities of adulthood. The spirits were villagers wearing carved wood masks and raffia from their neck to their feet. After the dance, spirits walked amongst us and then returned to the jungle. I didn’t realize then that I was seeing an early form of theatre.

 

In Ancient Greece, the poet Thespis was supposedly the first to have an actor step on a stage and turn choral recitation into drama. Their culture was amazingly social and public. Unlike us, who view our emotions as individual, personal, and essentially hidden, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly claim that for the Greeks, “moods were public and shared.” Emotions were visitations by gods. This was not like movies and tv today, not something to view isolated on a home computer, but shared, in a group, with each spectator knowing the lines so they could join in the recitation…

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

The Road Keeps Changing: The Power in Combining the Study of History with the Practice of Mindfulness Meditation

I was walking up this long rural road, a road I walk or drive on almost daily. And as I looked to the distance ahead, let my mind rest mindfully in the view, I suddenly felt there were layers in this road or under it. Old roads. Unknowns. The road has two lanes now. Was it once only one lane? A path traveled by native Americans? A deer path?

 

What was this hill like in the past before this road was built? What is hidden? I stopped and stared into the distance, imagining what the road might cover. These trees on the side. They are now maybe forty feet high. In many places there is just one lone tree fronting a home. Were the trees that bordered this road once part of a vast forest of interconnected trees, huge monsters reaching up to the sky?

 

We think of our road, village, town, or city as being just this, just the way it is now. The same old thing. But we know this isn’t the only way to see it. Not the only way it has been seen, even by me. This road, for example, was recently repaved and widened. The relationship of me standing here, the car speeding too fast by me, that crow calling, the spongy moth floating down its line never existed before.

 

What does it mean to me, now, that just 39 years ago, the lines of cables lining the road for the internet weren’t here? There was no Facebook, TikTok, texting.

 

What does it mean that 77 years ago World War II ended? A hundred years ago was the roaring 20’s. About four hundred years ago, the first Europeans came to this area, which had been populated up to then by the Cayuga tribe of Native Americans. Before the Cayugas, there were more bears than people. Today, we’re shocked, but maybe secretly filled with joy, when a bear walks down our street or visits the food market. Back then, the bears were shocked to see one of us in the forest. So much change.

 

How is this past alive in this present? What does it mean that our lives can change so much and so continuously? So much pain. So much gain and loss.

 

History is the story of change. Dr. Theodore Christou said history is rooted in storytelling. The Greek root of ‘history’ is historia, which means inquiry, seeking knowledge. And ‘story’, histoire in French, is history  without the ‘hi’.  Both words refer to an account of events.

 

We use stories to organize and shape the moments and events of our lives into memories. How we shape those stories is how we shape ourselves, create an identity or personal history. And we then know ourselves through these stories. Likewise, a culture knows itself through its stories. This history is a collective memory. It shapes how we relate with others and shows us who we are….

 

**To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

Putting Out the Flames: A Frightening Letter to Awaken the Conscience of Senators

 

A reader of my blogs shared with me a frightening letter. He felt something must be done, or that he must do something. He wrote by hand, to two Senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and sent the correspondence to the Senator’s offices. He also sent copies to a few media outlets hoping to motivate thousands of similar letters. Making a phone call, he thought, was ok. But a handwritten one is so old school and personal.

 

Here is the letter:

Dear Senators Sinema and Manchin,

Please vote for the voting rights bills now in Congress. Donald Trump is supported by people who call themselves Nazis. They praise Adolf Hitler and glorify war. If Trump wins again he will declare himself dictator, ending democracy forever. We must assume this because they will kill people we love.  

Senators Manchin and Sinema, when they start killing Democrats and minorities, the Republicans will let you join their party. You and your loved ones will be safe. For the love of my family and millions of families worldwide, please pass the voting rights bills.

Thank you,

 

His letter certainly expresses the fear he is feeling, not only for himself and his family, but for all of us. He sent it to awaken the conscience of these Senators, so they’d finally help put out the flames that are burning this nation and our world ⎼ or so they’d at least stop fueling the fires with their opposition to crucial legislation.

 

There is no doubt our nation and world are on fire. We know this, or many of us do. I think secretly we all know this. It’s hard to miss the fires that burned forests and homes in much of the western part of our nation this year and the recent past. It’s hard to miss sidewalks and roads that melted this past summer, record droughts, record windstorms and tornadoes that struck just a few weeks ago. Unless maybe we think they will only happen to someone else. They happen to all of us, one way or another, one disaster or another.

 

It is hard to miss the hate that too often walks our streets, or even our schools and workplaces. People shot or attacked. For being Black, Brown, Asian, HGBTQ, Jewish, Muslim, Native American ⎼ or a woman. They attack women who just want a choice as to what happens with their own body, or who want healthcare and rights equal to men. In Texas, the GOP passed a bill that could lead to mob violence against women and those who support them….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.